Radio UserLand, RSS, Weblog Tools and Design
Tuesday, February 18, 2003If you are new to blogging....
[Seblogging News]State of the Blogs Address: Dave's "First Essay of the Year"
Dave Winer published his "First Essay of the Year". If you are new to blogging or want to know more about the current state of it, it's a good read.Jeremy Allaire, of ColdFusion fame, has posted his thoughts on this essay. He has interesting ponderings of the present and is always thinking about what's next. [Brian Fitzgerald]
trackback. Pingback. I've just installed Simons Pingback client add-on for Radio. Does it work? Let's see if I can Pingback his article. It works! But only sends the Weblog name - what did I miss? That's cool though - great work Simon! [Matthew Langham's Radio Weblog] You're probably confusing pingback and trackback, trackback provides excerpts. Trackback is next on the list. [Simon Fell]
DaveNet: First essay of the year. [Scripting News]
More RSS Goodness!.
You can now subscribe to Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis (RSS feed) and Fresh Reviews from PC Magazine (RSS feed) in your aggregator of choice. [via NewsIsFree: Recent Additions]
[The Shifted Librarian]Ziff-Davis has two more RSS 2.0 feeds. One for PC Mag reviews, and the other for tech news from eWeek. Hey it looks like someone got the religion. Excellent stuff. [Scripting News]
Why I don't enable comments
Maybe it's a mistake, but I don't have comments on my site.
I publish most of the feedback I get and track responses on other sites (which is why we desperately need what Nick Denton describes in his Comments and Communities posting), but I don't open my site to floods of abuse, either of myself or other people. Forcing people to mail me makes them think first and the result is really good discussion.
Nick believes we'll all have blogs and we'll all use comments in dialogs that flow around the world. I think that many folks will follow along, using tools like Marc, Dave (who asked today why Halley's Comment blog doesn't allow comments) Mitch (Chandler, since it has a compound document architecture foundation will address tracking communications) and others are building, but there will be nodes where groups gather -- people do that naturally and we all know 95 percent of Web traffic is lurkers.
Every time I explain blogging, the first reaction from the listener is "sounds like information overload." This is why it's important to keep comments flowing through the author of some blogs. There are plenty that allow comments, and that's okay, but I'm with Dan Gillmor on this. My site is for structured and constructive thinking, not a free-for-all, which is why I think you'll find it valuable.
[RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing]Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?.
Wondering Why Daypop Isn't Indexing Your Blog?
Apparently I never submitted my blog to DayPop. DOH! It's a homer moment. What else can I say ? It's easy, fast and definitely worth submitting your blog if you haven't already. [_Go_]
[The FuzzyBlog!]Sorting items within a day.. Sorting items within a day. This is a great little tip from Mark Paschal. [Surgical Diversions]
Editing Radio Outlines on Your Palm.
Thanks to my new Treo, info on my PDA is always close by. I'm increasingly reliant on outlines as a way to organize info, collect thoughts, etc. But one limitation was that I couldn't edit the outlines on my Palm. When the Treo arrived, I put a little effort into trying to fix that.
You can read the results here.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]Radio as Infrastructure.
Ernie's post the other day about how he'll be using Radio to update his firm's News page got me thinking about how flexible Radio really is. Here's how I use Radio today:
- As a weblog application. Radio runs on my desktop and uploads new posts to my weblog TINS (just in case you hadn't figured it out, it's an acronym: There Is No Spoon, from a certain movie...).
- As an aggregator. I monitor over 80 web sites - Radio downloads new content from them hourly and presents them in my aggregator page, saving me at least a half hour a day and making me aware of countless things that would otherwise never hit my radar.
- As an outliner. I have become an outline junkie, using Radio's built-in outliner to organize many of my most critical job-related activities.
- As a conduit from my Treo to our intranet. An outgrowth of my outlining habit is the need to have quick access to my outlines. I use Natara Bonsai as my Palm-based outliner, and wrote a quick hack to automatically export all Bonsai outlines from my Treo to a directory in Radio. Once in that directory, Radio automatically converts the outline to HTML and uploads it to our intranet - making my information immediately available to the rest of my company. (Note: the conversion to HTML is possible thanks to an outstanding plug-in for Radio called ActiveRenderer.)
- As a promotional web site for my book. Along with my two co-authors, I manage a group weblog in support of our book about marketing on the Internet. Posts are aggregated by Radio and uploaded to bookblogs.com (a domain I own).
- As a subject matter backup. I maintain a separate category in Radio for posts relating to Knowledge Management. These posts are then aggregated by David Gurteen in the UK, who maintains a "Knowledge-log" of various contributors on KM topics. (Apology in advance to David - I've been a bit slack in contributing lately. I'll get better, I promise.)
To sum up, Radio currently uploads content from my desktop to four unique web sites on three separate domains. Some content is automatically generated, some is converted and uploaded, other content is simply mirrored from my desktop up to the web. Radio has become a critical piece of my desktop.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]My friend and super consultant Jon Oltsik has a new site built with Radio. The weblog is in process as are the links to the free reports he will post to his site. This shows how you can easily publish a standard site with Radio and comingle it with a weblog. More later as Dann helps him move this forward. If I was a consultant or an analyst (again), the first thing I would do would be to build a marketing site in Radio and publish it to my domain via FTP. The next thing I would do is start to publish a weblog on the topics I consult on (to start to capture the keywords in Google for that topic) and gain credibility with prospective customers. Many consultants get this, most don't. Frankly, if your brain isn't online, where is it? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Washington Post: "Since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply." [Scripting News]
BlogLinker.
BlogLinker
blogLinker.com is a free tool to manage your web links on your blog/website and to dramatically increase traffic to your site. It can be embedded anywhere in your web page and can be easily configured to fit the existing design of your site. blogLinker is the only tool of its kind. (from site) Uses javascript that places a table with links on your homepage. This can be tweaked in a variety of ways. I placed it on myBlogging from the Barrio
weblog. [Albert Delgado]
Sounds interesting. Another link service worth a closer look... [Sebastian Fiedler]
[Seblogging News]OPML Directories. Mikel has directed my attention to Dave's revival of OPML files as directory structures in Sunday's edition of Scripting News. As Dave demonstrates, the 'inclusion' feature of OPML (the link and url node attributes) allow for a really cool decentralized directory structure, with different persons managing different levels of what appears to be a unique outline. This has a lot of potential. If you have activeRenderer installed with your copy of Radio, you can experience the same level of integration within your web browser as you can using Radio's outliner. Take a look at my OPML directories demo. [read more] [s l a m]
Penciling in that weblogs in meatspace conference.
[Seblogging News]The Art of Blogging - Part 1
I've posted a new article: elearnspace.org/cgi-bin/elearnspaceblog/archives/000432.html">elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm">Blogging - Part I: Overview, Definitions, Uses, and Implications(I'll post Part II later this week). The article is an attempt to provide an overview of what blogging is...and how it responds to the characteristics of the Internet...and altering how information is/will be handled. [elearnspace]
New Article: Art of Blogging - Part 2
I've posted a new article: Art of Blogging - Part 2. In this article I address getting started, "how to blog", tools, RSS and aggregators [elearnspace]
An excellent introduction to the current world of blogging.
We seem to be in a new wave of reflection on the blogging phenomenon, witness Dave Winer's proposal for a weblogging conference (Weblogs In Meatspace ) and the ensuing discussion by Scoble, Paolo, AKMA, Aaron, and Sam Ruby, among others. Something I'd like to be able to put on my calendar as well (although, like Shelley Powers, I would prefer to see it held in the center of the country as opposed to one of the edges).
One suggestion on volunteers and cost management. Tap into the experience base of the science fiction world and their experience with Cons. They seem to be able to pull off very complex events on very small budgets. [Jim McGee]
How to Blog, part 2 - from eLearnspace comes this great article. Talks about the history of blogging, how to get started, and how to set up and use an aggregator. [Ernie the Attorney]
Blog on blog.
Even if you're not new to all ... this... Weblogging Resources has some interesting links, and advice to go with them.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]search form improvement.... A big thanks to Christian for his Google search form how-to information. Though I've been using Google as my site search for a while, I'm finally getting around to modifying the code so it only searches jenett.radio instead of the entire coolstop.com domain. Thanks xian!
(Note: The search form change won't appear on all pages until I finish some other changes still in the works, but the improved form now appears on all of this month's weblog pages.) [jenett.radio]
6/2/02: How to create a directory in Radio's Outliner. [Scripting News]
Radio fixes. I've made a story of the fixes to the Radio File menu "View in Browser" and "Save As HTML" [Surgical Diversions]